October 8^th, 1963 started rather quietly. It was the day before my birthday and Kathy was going to bake a cherry pie for me. Dale Tyree, our detachment commander, happened to be in Robbins AFB at a detachment commander’s conference at the Eastern Air Rescue Center headquarters. I was the crew commander on call that day when the alarm sounded around 8:30. Bruce and I ran to the helicopter on the alert pad and had it ready to takeoff in a very short time. Two paramedics piled in and we were airborne. I hovered above the fire suppression kit on the trailer and the ground crew slapped the cable ring into the hook on the bottom of the helicopter. I headed north into the wind away from our alert area and checked in with the tower. They said an F-106 which had taken off about 5 minutes previously had declared an emergency about 20 miles north at 36,000 feet. His engine had exploded and he was going to bail out as he could not make the field. Within a minute we saw a rising column of black smoke far in the distance. The tower could not confirm whether there were live weapons aboard.

I realized carrying the fire suppression kit (FSK) would drastically slow us down and elected to toggle it off on a nearby gravel road. Once free of the external load we were able to make good speed, around 105 knots. The tower saw the smoke but could not confirm whether the pilot had ejected. We were over the crash site in about 12 minutes and were unable to see any parachute on the way in to the scene. The F-106 had impacted in an open field after shearing off a number of trees before striking the ground. The cockpit area was intact and upright but the rest of the plane was in pieces. The entire engine had been torn from the plane and was standing erect near the cockpit. The pilot was still in the cockpit but not moving. I landed quickly and the paramedics dashed out along with Bruce to lend a hand.

I hovered the helicopter to blow the smoke and fire away from the cockpit. It couldn’t have been more than two or three minutes before the guys had the pilot out of the cockpit, on a stretcher and were strapping him in the back of the helicopter. The pilot was alive though badly injured. As we took off and headed back to the base several cars were seen heading to the accident on roads several miles away. I called the tower and told them we would be heading directly to the Loring hospital and would land at its helicopter site. The base was not in sight but I had a general idea where it was. We were at 500 feet and I asked the tower to give me a heading to the base.

Some minutes later we touched down at the hospital site and immediately shutdown. Hospital staff immediately examined the injured pilot in the helicopter, placed him on a cart, and literally ran into the emergency room. We took a minute or two to gather our wits, stow the first-aid equipment, secure the crash/rescue gear, and then took off to return to our alert area near the hangar. As I lifted off I can still remember seeing so many faces peering out the windows that faced the landing pad. After dropping off the paramedics we went to the north end of the base to retrieve the fire suppression kit (FSK.)

Once the mission was over we de-briefed our actions. Leaving the FSK behind had probably saved us 5-10 minutes and it turned out the fire was containable without it. We thought the pilot had ejected from the fighter and saving the plane was not our mission. The paramedics said the pilot had tried to eject, the canopy had blown, but the seat had not fired. The pilot’s feet had been retracted by cables into the stirrups to be secured before the seat fired. (This is part of the automated ejection sequence.) As such he was unable to free himself and go over the side. He was forced to land the plane from the bailout posture. The seat ejection rocket was armed. The paramedics used guillotine-like bolt cutters to sever the pressure lines to render the seat safe. They were then able to extricate the pilot. The pilot had a number of injuries including broken bones and lacerations. Later we learned this had been a training flight and only inert missiles were aboard.

Bruce began filling out rescue mission reports that needed to be sent to EARC (Eastern Air Rescue Center) in Robbins AFB. The helicopter was refueled, the interior was cleaned of debris and used medical supplies, and the on-board medical kits were re-stocked. About an hour later the flying safety officer from the F-106 squadron and an accident review team called to see about getting a flight to the crash site. Bruce said he would be the alert crew commander and recommended I take the second helicopter to the site. The trip lasted about two hours and a series of photographs were taken from the air. The Air Police had secured the site from the public. The team took many pictures on the ground and retrieved items that were on their recovery checklist.

My afternoon was spent internally re-living the rescue and handling calls from various agencies on the base. Dale called from Robbins AFB to get a first-hand report on the mission. He had the pleasure of then addressing the staff in Robbins and describing the mission to his peers and superiors. Base Information handled all communication with local and national civilian news media. We were asked to provide the names and rank of our crew members and our civilian home addresses. By the time I got home Kathy had word of what had happened. She had a doctor’s appointment that afternoon and had learned about the accident nearly first hand. She realized I was the crew commander that day and we talked well into the evening. Even now as I write this my face feels flushed as I re-lived the mission again.

The next day Bruce and I went to the tower to listen to the tapes of the mission. I was surprised how matter-of-fact I sounded -- under control and reasoned. Yet I knew the day before my heart had been racing and my mind was going a mile a minute sorting out the decisions I had to make. Later in the day the commander of the fighter squadron stopped by to personally thank us for saving one of his team. He asked a lot of questions about the mission and we showed him the helicopter and equipment. He offered to give us a ride in the F-106 at a later date. We detachment pilots wore international orange flight suits as did the pilots of the fighter squadron. We were immediately singled out as the “good guys” around the base and our modest little detachment became well known. Kathy clipped out a bunch of newspaper stories of the mission. Later our crew received plaques from the helicopter manufacturer for our mission. It was the first human life I had helped to save and I experienced profound feelings for having done so. The fighter pilot, Ray Girard, survived the accident and was returned to flying status the next year. I still have his thank you note.